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There are plenty of theorists who argue that football explains the world, but I have always been of the school that the world explains football — that there is a lot about the game that you can understand by knowing a few demographic and political facts.

The bigger a country’s GDP, the better it tends to do at the international game. The same is true of population size. However, even I was taken aback to learn of the theory put forward by Miguel, Saiegh and Satynath. In 2011, they found a relationship between the number of years of war a country